In my second year at Cambridge I never stopped acting. Richard and I were together again in Performing Rights by Garry O’Connor in a season of undergraduate plays, perhaps appropriately in a triangular relationship. My character was Ron, a boozy Cockney saxophonist, and as such my first working-class role.
As a climax to my second year, we crammed in the musical of Love’s Labours Lost, entitled just Love’s Labours. It was pure thespian riot, full of humour, verbal dexterity, clever unexpected rhymes and musical parody. As Berowne I sang ‘I forsooth am in love’. But the most brilliant number of all, ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’, was sung by Ian McKellen and Mike Burrell, that well-known duo from Henry IV – it made the audiences clamour for encores. The Broadsheet reviewer was less than complimentary about me, saying I ‘enjoyed a prominence unmerited by my ability’ (this was in the days when I still read reviews)! I appeared in only one play with Peter Cook, The Investigator, in which I played Thomas Jefferson, and he Karl Marx and Chopin.
Of course, I didn’t know at that early age what others were thinking and feeling inside, nor for most of the time what I was thinking and feeling myself, but we all believed and were even sure that we were very happy. Ian McKellen was perhaps being rather over-modest and self-deprecating when he said of himself at Cambridge that he was ‘hopeless at stepping onto the stage without any aids and just behaving in the style of myself’. He claimed that personally he felt awkward and unhappy at Cambridge, but to us he seemed far from being so: or I was too blinkered to notice. At Cambridge I did not know Ian well. I had no idea of what subsequently came to light, that he carried a torch for me, for he never showed or expressed it. Later he was to say he had fallen in love with me, and that it was a passion which was ‘undeclared and unrequited’.
There was an occasion when it could have been. We were together in the summer of 1959 during the run of Love’s Labours at the old Lyric, Hammersmith. He ended up one night (I am not quite sure how) bedding down with us. As he said, ‘There was no hanky-panky, and I can’t work out why I was there. I must’ve missed a bus or something. I can’t really remember, but it was a Saturday night I know, because there was a review in the Sunday Times, and Harold Hobson mentioned me, and I think only me, and I read that in Derek’s house, so I took the paper away with me in case he read it. I was pretty certain it was a Saturday night, and it was the last night of the run.’
Ian became part of my life in a peripheral way. We have always been close but never intimate. I admire him hugely as an actor, which first started when I saw him as Shallow. I always saw him in those early years as a character actor, not as himself but as someone else. Not confident as a face (blond and blue-eyed), he was handsome in his way, but not a great looker. But neither was I, certainly not like Michael York, who appeared in Cambridge at that time, and I suddenly realised what being handsome really meant, and the impact it had. At Cambridge Ian was not that outgoing: you could say a little introverted – very much his own man.
‘Will you go out and get me a paper?’ Dad said on my arrival home.
My twenty-first birthday was on 22 October 1959 and that weekend I was home for the party we were holding. I went to the shop and bought a paper. I took it in to find Dad and Mum looking at me expectantly. After a short pause Dad asked me to go back to the shop and buy some cigarettes for him. This time when I returned both were standing by the front door. They looked at me a bit oddly.
‘Didn’t you notice anything in the road?’ Dad asked.
‘No. What’s there to notice? There are cars as usual.’
‘Didn’t you see a red Ford Popular?’
‘Yes.’ Sure enough I’d seen a red Ford Popular.
‘And didn’t you look at it?’
‘No.’
‘Go and look.’
I went over to it. Tied to the steering wheel was a big silver key, the twenty-first birthday symbol, and the car keys. I was overwhelmed. I burst into tears.
‘However did you manage to get the money to buy that?’
‘Well, we started putting aside ten shillings a week to save up for it twenty-one years ago when you were born,’ explained Dad.
This must have been the longest slow-burn in history. To wait twenty-one years for the joy of seeing my reaction!
We held a glorious party given by Mum and Dad at a children’s nursery in Forest Gate. Dad hired a charabanc to collect friends from Cambridge. At first the divide between my glamour friends from Cambridge and those from East London was painfully visible. My locals stood at one end of the hall, my Cambridge mates at the other: facing these two sides of my life brought together for the first time felt more than a bit hairy, but gradually everyone settled, intermingled, and then mixed famously. There was cabaret from Peter Cook, Eleanor Bron and David Frost, which was some line-up for a children’s nursery in Forest Gate!